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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27517654">Ask And You Shall Receive</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/gunsforeyes/pseuds/gunsforeyes'>gunsforeyes</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magnus Archives (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-08 04:56:05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,140</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27517654</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/gunsforeyes/pseuds/gunsforeyes</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>How are things going for Elias in this new nightmare world of his? Not great, it turns out. Rating for general Elias-related themes.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>21</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Ask And You Shall Receive</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It was finished. He had <i>won.</i></p>
<p>Two centuries of living, decades of work, innumerable sleepless nights where he wondered, would this <i>work?</i> Sacrifices made and favors given and received and strings pulled and the closest he’d ever got to actually praying, blood and sweat and tears and the constant, unrelenting fear, and he had succeeded. He was the first, the <i>only,</i> to succeed. It had worked out so perfectly, the stumbling blocks even serving to further his purpose, to the point that he sometimes entertained the notion that he had the Eye’s blessing, and now he was here. His old, useless body was rotting away beneath the ground, and he was the king of the ruined world. </p>
<p>And it was <i>agony.</i></p>
<p>Elias was used to absorbing, categorizing, filing away vast amounts of knowledge. Used to Seeing and Hearing more information than most people did in a lifetime, and he had several lifetimes’ worth. It did not overwhelm him. He knew how to process it. He knew how to use it. He knew how to keep his own thoughts in the midst of what he learned. </p>
<p>But that had been a trickle, and this was a flood. An onslaught of thoughts and terrors and miseries from every person in the world, from every angle. He felt the dark thrilling joy of some of the avatars, the reluctance and disgust and horror of others, the acid-sharp fear of the billions of victims. He saw the nuances of their suffering, knew exactly what every flame and every ant and every drone <i>meant</i> to them. And it was <i>sublime,</i> it was godlike, but Elias, while more than a man, was less than a god. </p>
<p>It came in waves, too, like a flood. There would be days - whatever days meant in this new world, where all he knew was that time moved strangely and far too slowly - where he would lose track of himself, where he would forget who and where he was and become lost in the sea of torment he’d created. Where his body was far from him, even if he’d been able to recall that he had one, had arms and legs and fingers and organs and a mind, and he’d be nothing but disembodied eyes, nothing but disembodied ears, nothing but a vessel. </p>
<p>When it abated, hardly at all but just enough, he’d find himself collapsed on the floor, in a different spot than the one he remembered, his head splitting and his body trembling as though it would burst at the seams. There would always be blood, and he’d long ago given up on trying to clean it up. It would always return, even when he thought he was in his right mind, puddles appearing as though out of nowhere. Was it from his eyes? His nose? His mouth? His ears? His pores? He couldn’t find any trace of it on himself. He didn’t need to eat, or sleep, he knew that, but he wondered if in this world of nightmares his body still replenished its blood. </p>
<p>He should know the answer. Shouldn’t he? Perhaps he did. Perhaps he had forgotten. He hoped he would remember. He knew enough to recognize that this was how so many of the fears operated. A short time of lessened pain, making the renewal so much more horrible, worse than if it had never stopped at all. </p>
<p>His glasses had broken at some point, but it was hardly necessary to see his immediate surroundings. His vision, when he cast it out over the world, was perfect. </p>
<p>And yet, he couldn’t hate it, the deluge of information that left him a broken wreck. It fed him. It sustained him. He gorged on it like a swollen tick, and it was viciously sweet. Like overindulging in ice cream, if ice cream gave one a brain freeze so severe one screamed oneself hoarse. </p>
<p>He loved it, and the worst part was knowing it would kill him. Not yet, not today or tomorrow, as meaningless as those terms were now, but eventually. Eventually everyone, every<i>thing</i> would die. The world he had created was not sustainable. Even the Eye would be swallowed by the End, once there was nothing left to watch. </p>
<p>Elias had made this world so that he could cheat death, so that he could outrun his own mortality, that one fear that made men do monstrous and cowardly and courageous things. He had been so sure that once he succeeded, the indignity of rot, of nothingness, would never consume <i>him.</i> But all he had done was ensure it. If he had continued to take new hosts once the old ones outlived their usefulness, he could have survived indefinitely. It wouldn’t have been impossible, with his power, if he was careful. If the Extinction never manifested. But here death was a certainty, far off but approaching. He could almost feel its bony fingers around his raw and aching throat. </p>
<p>Jon was coming for him, with Martin in tow, and given the latter’s recent propensity for vengeance and violence, Elias doubted he would make the same mistake he had in the tunnels. Perhaps he would even succeed, if they arrived at a time when Elias’s mind was far away, too overwhelmed to be able to pinpoint the coming threat. </p>
<p>He could have told them they were wasting their energy. Killing him would do nothing. Unsupervised, the world, the domain of the Watcher would still watch. Elias was only a cog. Only another soul trapped, caught blissfully and intolerably between victim and victor, torturer and tortured. </p>
<p>In one of his moments of something closer to clarity, he had begged. Shamefully and tearfully he had begged the Eye to grant him more power, to give him the ability to shoulder the burden he’d taken on. Unsurprisingly, his pleas had been met with silence. </p>
<p>Weakness was alien to him. <i>Helplessness</i> even more so. What else had all of his work been for, but to rid himself of his humanity? His human flaws and fears? Peter would laugh at him, he knew. <i>Everything you’ve done, Elias, and this is how you end up?</i> he would say, in that calm, friendly tone of his. <i>You’re more alone than I could ever dream of being. Well done.</i></p>
<p>He wished Peter were here so that this time, Elias could be the one to kill him. </p>
<p>And still time ticked on, or stood still, whatever it did now. And still his body deteriorated with his mind, neither of them dying, but coming closer with every gasping breath. And still the Eye was silent, watching him in his misery, feeding off of him as he fed off those in his world, and the feel of it on him burned him like the sun, but he refused to give up. Elias Bouchard- <i>Jonah Magnus</i> did not <i>lose.</i></p>
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